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SOME MATHEMATICAL CHARACTERS, CRACKPOTS & CRAZIES

SOME MATHEMATICAL CHARACTERS, CRACKPOTS & CRAZIES. Chuck Groetsch MAASE – March 28, 2008. Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way. Tom Lehrer. TAKING HILBERT AT HIS WORD. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.

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SOME MATHEMATICAL CHARACTERS, CRACKPOTS & CRAZIES

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  1. SOME MATHEMATICAL CHARACTERS, CRACKPOTS & CRAZIES Chuck Groetsch MAASE – March 28, 2008

  2. Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way. Tom Lehrer

  3. TAKING HILBERT AT HIS WORD

  4. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad. J.E. Littlewood 1885-1977

  5. Interesting or Amusing Cases

  6. “Grand Law of the Generation of Quantities” “Key to the Universe”

  7. Michel Chasles 1793 - 1880 FRS, FLMS, Copley Medalist Caveat Emptor!

  8. DAVID HILBERT 1862-1945 Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen.

  9. Hilbert’s funeral oration:

  10. Oliver Heaviside 1850-1925

  11. Grigori Perelman Keep your medal and your money

  12. SAD CASES

  13. Georg Cantor 1845 - 1918 A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One

  14. Alan Turing 1912 - 1954 Father of the programmable computer; artificial intelligence.

  15. Turing the marathoner Turing the Enigma cracker

  16. Turing Test A machine pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman …..

  17. Dip the apple in the brew. Let the sleeping death seep through. Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs

  18. Gödel has gone completely crazy … He has voted for Eisenhower! A. Einstein

  19. JOHN FORBES NASH 1928 - This man is a genius.

  20. The Nash equilibrium; Nash imbedding theorem; Nash-Moser Theorem, … Nobel laureate 1994 The Phantom of Fine Hall “A religious figure of great, but secret importance” The Emperor of Antarctica

  21. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of effort.

  22. SCARY CASES

  23. Academie des Sciences Becquerel Prize 1948 The ‘mad mathematician of Charenton’ It’s a matter of mathematical logic. … I began my work at the time of that famous meal. It is not finished yet. I wanted to know how things were.

  24. Oswald Teichmüller Oswald Teichmueller 1913-1943 Aryan students want Aryan mathematics, not Jewish mathematics …

  25. Ludwig Bieberbach 1886-1982

  26. Deutsche Mathematik The important task for ‘National Socialist science’ is to recognize the existence of the ‘German essence’ in works of science and to then ‘proceed to action’. Ludwig Bieberbach

  27. U. Bomber

  28. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not , as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that the danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. G.K. Chesterton

  29. Wir Mathematiker sind alle ein bischen meschuge Landau

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